


absolute beginners

by cosmogyral



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/M, Moirails With Pails, Remedial Sex Ed for Elfkings, Tol-in-Gaurhoth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-05
Updated: 2015-09-05
Packaged: 2018-04-18 10:32:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4702781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmogyral/pseuds/cosmogyral
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Sauron held up a mirror,” Finrod says. “Clear as Aeluin! I had all my bonds broken for me before I entered his halls. Blood was not bond enough, nor fealty; friendship died in the frost, and oaths-- I am a free elf at last, not countryman, not king, not son, not husband, not brother. No aid to the Beorings, at the last. No true friend to you.” There, in the darkness; the low sound, the wolf’s breath. “Only the last bond is left, that keeps me in my skin…”</p>
<p>“And the manacles stapling you to the wall,” Andreth says, dry, and the walls of Tol-in-Gaurhoth vanish. Finrod is left blinking, hard, against the sudden accession of light.</p>
<p>“Actually,” he says, “only one is attached to the wall.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	absolute beginners

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gogollescent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/gifts).



> This is Gogol's birthday present, so normally I'd be like, "and also her fault," but... no. This fic is my fault. It's my fault. Heartfelt thanks to Emily, without whom this fic would be just one solid block of semicolons with occasional em-dashes, and to Sares and Canada for the fact that this fic was not eaten by werewolves.
> 
> Title is from M. Ward's "For Beginners."

Finrod wakes by Andreth’s hearthfire and is instantly an object lesson for her on the boundaries of Elven grace when he catches himself halfway through slipping off his chair. She is regarding him with her usual reserve; usual, that is, for the start of their conversations, or a long way into their aftermath. He says, “Greetings, lady.”

“What a cautious welcome,” she observes. She is shelling walnuts. “You never found the habit of caution with me before.”

Ah. “No, nor ever lost the habit of offending you.”

Her mouth turns up. “All else—but not that.” 

How old is she now? Her hair is almost all white, that strong fine color like Celebrian’s, but she can still sit for the long labor of having it braided; her hands have begun to curl, but they don’t shake. Seventy, perhaps. Counting the years of the Edain has become harder as they’ve grown longer.

He leans off the chair, on purpose this time, and can feel the fire pull the skin on his cheeks—he can smell the woodsmoke—he can smell _pine_ woodsmoke, from a tree with too much sap. How real this all is! Only to focus his attention to find more detail! And at the thought he thinks, _green pine,_ and the smell turns acrid, and the smoke rising from the fire is thick and black. Not that the Edain would ever make such a mistake—and with that he remembers Bëor’s hut, on the night when he himself had made the fire, heroically taking the freshest wood he could find, and nearly choked the whole line of Bëor to death. One of Finrod’s first lessons from the Edain: how to season firewood. Or as Andreth might put it: that lighting a fire in a mud hut is not much like lighting one in a broad stone hall.

He tries to laugh. His throat seems to be too dry for laughter. “Andreth,” he says, “I am dreaming.”

“So you are,” she says.

Curiosity’s a dull spur, but a hard rider. If he strains, he can feel the wall of Tol-in-Gaurhoth, the slow itch in his flesh of the chains working their way down to bone. Most of his strength is gone. What is left is given to those who live: Beren, and Edrahil. He shouldn’t be able to walk in dreams.

Some things he need not strain to feel. The pain has chased him here, and the smell of blood.

“Andreth,” he says, again. “ _How_ am I dreaming?”

“I know not,” she says. “It may be that I lend thee strength.”

“Perhaps. A memory of comfort,” Finrod says. “I feel taller.” This time, he finds that he can laugh, a little. “Memory with the Eldar is our truest gift, and yet I cannot remember my own height without an augmentation. A great truth, when you called me proud!”

Her lips tighten. “Even with the same bitterness as you speak now.”

Surely no one save Andreth has ever sounded _that_ bitter. He doesn’t say this. The memory of emotion keeps hooking in him. As though he is being dragged by his breastbone above the surface of some dark water, and the line cannot hold him. “Well, you are no wight of Sauron,” he says. “He hasn’t your art of conversation.”

 “Once you told me that only the half-shadowed called warfare an art.”

“The new music of clash and clatter against the thunder of the drums,” he says; his own words to Amarië, though not the most foolish of them. “Andreth, I never meant to ill-speak your people’s poetry.”

“No, though I took it so.” She smiles at him. “Will you make poems of war in Valinor?”

The hook slips; the line breaks. Finrod says, “Likely not.”

She hasn’t noticed. She is oddly diffident as she says, “Will you sing ours?”

The last time they had this conversation, he had come to her to sing the blindness out of her eyes. They had made the spell together: a desire of which only Mannish words could speak and Elvish music weave. A stab of remembered pride: _see the arts of Beleriand!_ And here the song has come at last—waiting to be devoured.

“I do not know what I will be left with,” he tells her. He has his harp now. He touches its strings and remembers it into better tune. He plucks a suspension.

Her voice is reedy and sharp. “I call to you in need and not for self-pity.”

“You called to me because you had lost your sight,” Finrod says. He plucks another one. Beren coughs in the dark. “And, able to heal that wound, I healed it. Far-seeing and mighty in art am I. So mighty that I rode out against Sauron in fell disguise with ten proud men at my back, and sang to him escape, of freedom, of the breaking of bonds! The gates of Minas Tirith I rang with my song, the werewolves howled, the stars shivered in the sky—I it was who would unbind the unbearable, strike the fetters off the feet of the Unholy himself! And do you know what Sauron did?”

“No,” Andreth says. The dark is falling around them.

“Merely held up a mirror,” Finrod says. “Clear as Aeluin! I had all my bonds broken for me before I entered his halls. Blood was not bond enough, nor fealty; friendship died in the frost, and oaths— I am a free elf at last, not countryman, not king, not son, not husband, not brother. No aid to the Beorings, at the last. No true friend to you.” There, in the darkness: the low sound, the wolf’s breath. “Only the last bond is left, that keeps me in my skin…”

“And the manacles stapling you to the wall,” Andreth says, dry, and the walls of Tol-in-Gaurhoth vanish. Finrod is left blinking, hard, against the sudden accession of light.

“Actually,” he says, “only one is attached to the wall.” He puts his other hand out in front of him, as if to demonstrate, and it hits her copper pot.

She is bent over it, but it is an ordinary bent, a busy daylight bent. She is fifty, her skin and hair still rich and dark, and Boromir’s dog is crouched low on the hearth. He is silent as he watches her work. She says, finally, conversationally, “I used to dream of you stripped of all trust and learning to die.”

“I know,” he says.

She straightens up for garlic. She brushes against the ceiling. She, too, seems taller in memory. “Because you used to walk in my mind, and pick from it what you chose, to better aid translation.”

“No,” he says. “Because I’ve met you.”

This makes her half-smile, and the dog’s ears flick up, sensing a shift in the weather. “And why did you return?”

“Because I used to dream of you drowning in Aeluin.”

“These are the gulfs between Men and Elves,” Andreth says, in the tone she uses to lecture some child of Marach on Adanel’s errors. “Your wish is for the past unmade; we wish for the future remade. Thus are Men always turned towards the new.”

He shakes with laughter. “Saelind!”

“Thou’rt the only one who calls me that as I hear it,” she says. “Didst thou know?”

“I am thine only acquaintance who bears it the same,” he returns, rueful, still-laughing. “Curse that it is. Wert thou called after me?—No, don’t say it. ‘Not _all_ of our lives eddy in thy wake, Lord of Nargothrond.’”

“Thou hast me exactly,” she says, approvingly, and hands him the wooden spoon to taste. He bends and inhales: fennel, pears, the pale and wicked cider from Brethil. The edge of starvation seems to have nothing to do with the hunger of the memory. He leans in, barbarously, and tastes it. She yanks the spoon back. “Hound!”

“Wolf,” he says, delighted. Now he is standing, his hand wrapped around her wrist, still holding the spoon, and he tugs her towards him, and she goes with him—easy, it had been so easy, for a heartbeat—and then freezes, her eyes searching his for something—

Strange that he should dwell here; strange that his spirit, wandering, should fetch up on a moment of awkwardness, a fond mistake. Stranger that he should remember it like this, as though the moment has stopped and points of light illumine the finer things—his fingers picked out with clarity, but is he clad in armor or in his work gear? Andreth’s cheeks, lined or unlined? The room too-warm with the naked heat of the fire, and not a shred else on the walls? Why should he dwell here, and not know where he dwells?

This is not his memory.

“Andreth,” he says, “how art _thou_ dreaming?”

Andreth’s eyes are fixed on his. He sees her flare of fear. “Must we speak of it now?”

“No,” he says. “Not yet.” His heart has leapt, and now, made unsteady, it sends him rills of sudden joy. “I should have known I could not dream thee so completely.” Though her form is uncertain, three ages at once, a patterning of fog over her well-deep spirit— _her_ spirit—here, here!—he himself the clearest thing in the moment they are still suspended in—he trains his attention on details, and only moves the mist around. “Am I in a mortal’s dream, or a mortal’s memory? Or have both transmuted in your passage? All the Beorings spoke so of it, but I never believed—Andreth, how dost thou—?” He can’t find the words in Sindarin. In Taliska, hopelessly, gleefully, “—get anything _done?_ ”

It’s her turn to laugh, swiping her free hand over her eyes. “Harper! As though thou needst to ask!”

“Men said that songs were an aid to memory. I saw the shape of forgetting in your minds, and I imagined,” he says, gesturing, “a vessel too small to hold the river of your days. So that it ran out. Not _this!_ ”

“A little vessel,” she says, some great, embarrassed fondness ringing through her. “Finrod, was it _never_ taught to thee to govern thy tongue?”

“Never,” he says, catching her other hand and spinning her, and the youngest of her selves spins around with him, into the dance. “Not for lack of trying!”

Her hands wrap around his, fingertips brushing the bite of the manacles against the last of muscle and bone. “This is our memory,” she says. “Would you like to see a mortal dream?” The shift in tone is all he has before she grabs hold, hard, and pulls, and he is sprawled out flat over her, on her straw-stuffed bed, starlight and hearthlight on all her brown skin. He is in the middle of kissing her. Neither of them know the taste of her mouth, but all else one or the other has imagined. He learns what else she has imagined when he draws back and he finds himself with his head already between her legs. He wrenches the initiative away, presses a kiss to the inside of one long thigh. She gasps, and he does it again; hums against her skin, then moves higher.

The dream catches him up, shows him what he has done only once before in life, grants him a measure of extra skill. How often has she taken this pleasure? With how many other friends? How is it that her knowledge of the world outstrips him at every turn, and how is it that she surprises him with every stifled sound, with the pressure of her hands in his hair, with her fingers running along the curve of his ear until he shocks the dream into its bright conclusion?

He pushes himself halfway up, dizzy, from the floor, remembering his clothes as he goes. They are breathing hard.

“My thanks,” he says. “For the lesson.”

Houseless and unbound from shame, she does not bother to blush. He finds that he is a little sorry. “I didn’t know that that had stayed with me,” she says. “We do run over, you know. But what we hold is refracted, too.”

 “Refract or reflect on me, I’ll not complain.” Finrod runs his hands through his hair, putting it back into its braids. There are fleas in it, in Tol-in-Gaurhoth. He picks one out and wonders if its dreams have come with it. “I will take what I might.” He smiles, a little ruefully, at her. “I won’t hold much, come the last.”

Her own smile fades, and she sits up, easily, as he had never known her. “Art so close to it?”

“Yes,” he says. “Even without the wolf. When that last chain snaps.”

She has settled into one form. It is between times, and a dress is slipping over one shoulder. For a Man, it is a fair form; for a wise woman, it will bear her. The shadows in the room have crept around her, though the starlight too has stayed. Never in life would she let her thatch go so to ruin, he thinks, and with that thought the cold of a clean night air comes in as well.

“Twice thou hast spoken of thy flesh as a chain,” she says, soberly. “Finrod, what hast thou come to?”

“Only to knowledge,” he says. He gathers his cloak to him. “It must have come in the end. Indeed it has come in the end, has it not, and no sooner?”

“What knowledge is this, that rejects thy life?”

That is the anger that simmered in her sixty years ago, and he says, weary, “How can you wish to lose an argument you’ve already won? I don’t reject life. It was given to me, and now it has passed—” He catches himself. “I was going to say, beyond thought. But before you woke me, even that—and, Andreth, it was a mercy, or else I would still be walking all of my mistakes. Life is out of my grasp, to love or not to love. It is death’s face I have learnt to fear.”

There is a great pain working itself out across her face; and then a greater spasm of amusement. “Finrod, wilt thou do this to me?” she demands. “Even now, when I come to thee for aid? Wilt thou make me so?”

The tears are standing in his eyes. “For my aid? Andreth, _I_ cannot aid you!”

“I know,” she says. “So will I place you in debt again, Nóm, to the House of Bëor. There!” she says, aside, “there’s another chain for you to break, before you can flee. I tell you it is not death you fear but life! I know you too well. You fear life—life after pain has remade it—you fear life in a new shape, coward, craven, Lord of Caves! You are _not_ friendless, not homeless, not even faithless, but were you all these things you would be no less than a child of the Edain—than little Beren who hangs in his fetters and whom you will not let die—but that you have been once a king!”

“And so I am too proud!” he says, and fury wakes in him. “Should I be humble and yearn for shame beyond telling? If ever I leave the halls of death, to walk again in the West, with those I have betrayed, waiting the homecoming of those who have betrayed me! _We_ cannot escape what we cannot bear!”

“Nor can I,” she says, tightly. “But I have nowhere else to go.”

From the roots of her hair the white is creeping back. As she was, when he first saw her here; as she sees herself. The shape of her houseless ghost. Seeing a friend recalled, he had closed his eyes to it: Andreth is dead too long to be passing through.

He thinks of her rising from her unreported grave. Ten years ago. How she must have wandered: passing over Anfauglith, over Taur-nu-Fuin, over Serech, over all her dead, and even the dead of her dead; over Aegnor’s bones, and Barahir’s, and Dorthonion’s. How strange that they should have all the same graves to mourn. Until she came at last to Tol Sirion. Where Sauron has his steading.

“For Elves, he must build prisons to make us rot,” Finrod says. “For thee, he has made—what?”

“A web,” she says. “To catch moths.”

He takes her hand. Anger is still pounding in his throat. Her fingers slide up, around his arm. After a moment, he follows her, his thumb coming up to draw a line against her wrist. He says, “Thou canst break it.”

Andreth shakes her head, once. “But I am afraid.”

“And thou seek’st my aid,” he says.

“Yes,” she says. “So perhaps now thou seest why thy protestations do not overawe me.”

“Mandos himself would forbid it,” he says. Put in this shape, it is a problem to be solved, a puzzle to give three answers to: she cannot flee and he cannot stay. And when has he ever turned away a question that his people brought? When indeed has he not ridden out after the question, if it would not be asked? Ridden, for a fingerspan of years, to Ladros, and interrupted Andreth at her labors, and argued down the sun with her?

Which brings with it another thought: that she is right. He has not broken all his trust as yet.

The hut folds down, though the hearthfire remains, and the stars, which do not illumine the cell. He can feel its shape where the dream drops away. Before, he could only guess from the position of the bodies, the entry of the wolf, but now he can tell that it is a small room in which he is immured, not so very deep. Shallow and close. Sauron has been careful with space.

What would Finrod have done before the Fen of Serech, when he was a mighty king? Called his harp to him; sung unbinding and unblinding, and let her go. Trailing her tears and her thanks.

Well, then, he will not do that. He says instead, “Fine words, from a lady of the Edain.”

Her eyes narrow. “What?”

He grins. “I said, Andreth Saelind, daughter of Boromir, heir of Boron and of Baran and of Balan, that thou hast learnt thy lessons poorly.”

“ _Thy_ lessons, mean’st thou?” she snaps. “Great faith in what no one will ever see! A great leap into a vast gape!”

“No; thine. Those that thou hast taught! Thou art of the Edain, and speak’st thou of fear, staying thee in Sauron’s stronghold? Speak’st thou of the fruitless march, and will not make it? No daughter art thou of the wise ones who came over the mountains in the old times, knowing that all would come to naught, and yet giving the Nameless One not even the right to their bones and the scraps of their ghost!”

“Ah, no!” she cries. “To make of my words a hell-brand, to goad me into the void withal!”

“Not if I thought for a heartbeat that thou shouldst go there,” he says. “Not if I knew despair. But I do not know it. Do I, Andreth? I have only glimpsed it, over thy shoulder, in the dark. There is thy huntsman. The shot was true: but shall he have the spoils?”

She is weeping after all, but they are awful tears, choking and harsh, the kind that forgetting one’s body should be enough to leave behind. He reaches for her, and the chained hand jerks him back, so that he must one-armed draw her close. After the first stiffening she lets herself be embraced as it shakes itself out, heaving, against the side of his neck. She _is_ taller in dream.

Under the tears, of a sudden, her laughter. “Nóm,” she says, “don’t tell our stories in Valinor, when thou mak’st sport with thy betrothed. Thou hast not one of them aright.”

“And who shall gainsay me?” he says, lofty and fine.

“I shall,” she says, and manages to smile. “For after all I know how well thou wilt remember me.”

Andreth with her fine hair, and her broad, dark eyes, and her tall cheekbones, her knotty hands, her vinegar voice; her shoulders steadying out, her breath coming easy. He drinks the sight of her.

Then she shrugs a little, as if taking off a cloak. Something slips away from her; some curtain of power, some geas, and with it some of her substance, and then more and more. No door appears, to lead her through; no vision of the road. But then, what does he know of what she sees?

“Wait!” he says, and leans out against his chain to a kiss—brief and hungry, warm, a great startlement to her at the last. “I must— needs do this now,” he says, taking another. “The next time thou’lt meet me, I shall be a married man.”

She steals her own kiss in return—then plants her hand in the center of his chest and shoves him back.  He catches himself against the stone wall he has never left. “Well, it’s time and enough for that, child,” she tells him, an echo, a shadow, a dancing spark; “thou’rt nearly grown!”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [wise with great wisdom](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7981531) by [gogollescent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent)




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